It's been about an hour since the final voice message played and this film closed and I sit here absolutely floored by the power of Chantal Akerman's cinema. Her work specifically in the 70s has become something of great importance to me personally. Her films in this period are formally rigorous, pushing the form into areas that I'm not sure had been approached yet and it's a shame that nobody remembers her for anything other than Jeanne Dielman.

Les Rendez-vous d’Anna is a deeply personal kind of autobiographical tale. Anna moves through cities showing her films having short encounters with strangers, friends and family and each scene is filled with a kind of unknowing sadness that seeps through. Anna is…

In New Orleans, everything is demarcated temporally as "before the storm" or "after the storm." The entire world is shaped and colored by Hurricane Katrina and the federal floods, and it comes up in unexpected ways, from casual references used to indicate when something happened to significant, simple explanations for why something is the way it is now. It's always there. In The Meetings of Anna, the watershed moment that seems to haunt all of the characters is apparently WWII.

It's there haunting everyone Anna meets, directly or indirectly, from lost loved ones to the economic results of the war. It has, over the 30 years between the end of it and the time of this film, altered countless lives,…

Chantal Akerman almost exclusively works on horizontal planes of space. Her compositions are known for their flat, minimalist staging, and she usually cuts with perpendicular angles to emphasize each shot's flatness. So one of the many surprising shots in Les Rendez-Vous d'Anna comes early. Anna leaves her hotel in Germany, and the camera tracks alongside her in a horizontal dolly. Suddenly, a flash of vertical motion interrupts the frame. It's a female maid, almost nonchalantly in the background, waving a sheet as she makes the bed. Another few moments later, another maid appears in the depth of the frame, also working. Akerman then cuts to a perpendicular frame, as Anna continues to walk down the hallway, and three more maids…

Les rendez-vous d'Anna is a formal curiosity first and a character piece second.

Revolving around a female film director traveling to the location of her newest film's screening, the film's premise carries the expectation of glamour, colorful characterizations and perhaps a cinema-based narrative. However, Chantal Akerman offers none of these things, actively avoiding what is normally seen in stories like this and radically shifting storytelling conventions. There are no sparkling movie stars working the room and the actual screening is never shown. Instead, the bulk of the film concerns itself with mundane activities and static action- lonely evenings in hotel rooms and lengthy train rides.

Anna, our protagonist, has five meetings throughout her trip. There's a sexual encounter with a…

At least in my viewings of her work, Chantal Akerman seems to be the actress/writer/director who seems the most human to me. Her characters are human, flawed, distant, walled-up and protected just like anyone confronting the lunacies of today. If anything, her excellent film in The Criterion Collection's Eclipse Series, 'Chantal Akerman in the Seventies', exemplifies the discordant dystopia of real people trying to make it in today's world far more realistically and accurately than any science fiction from then could have even thought to be. Of course, she had to die before her time, taking her life, exhausted of any other conceivable possibility.

I had the good fortune, and the foresight, being Canadian and 17, to travel by myself,…